Spreading Tinder over Dry Scrub

John Gittings

The newsagent at the end of my lane in Shanghai always sold out of Nanfang Zhoumo (‘Southern Weekend’) within hours. For those reporting on China, this famous – and to the Communist Party leadership, maddening – investigative weekly published in Guangzhou was, and still is, essential reading. One week it might contain a serious discussion on the death penalty, the next a critique of the restrictions imposed on migrant workers, or an exposé of the penetration of the China market by US agribusiness. None of these topics is explicitly forbidden, but they are all sensitive subjects that the Communist Party prefers not to air.

Other Chinese magazines and papers also carry riveting articles, although less regularly and with less risk to their editors’ careers. There was always at least one good piece in the Xinmin Weekly, published by the Shanghai media group, whose tabloid Xinmin Evening News was also much more popular than the Party broadsheet. I remember one cover story on the computer junk trade which described Chinese peasants breathing in toxic fumes as they dismantled mountains of VDUs and motherboards shipped in from abroad. A second story exposed a mining disaster: the owner had bribed local officials to cover up the death toll and had dumped the victims’ bodies in a ditch.

Another source of ideas during my time in Shanghai between 2001 and 2003 was a new environmental group whose meetings were called ‘tea parties’ so as not to alarm the authorities. One of the first speakers was Li Changping, an outspoken campaigner against the crippling taxes imposed on poor rural communities. Li runs his own website called ‘Friends of the Farmer’, which has links to a dozen other sites concerned with China’s social and economic problems. Liang Congjie, the founder of China’s Friends of Nature (and the son of a famous architect who protested in the 1950s against the destruction of old Beijing), spoke at another tea party. Friends of Nature was one of the first Chinese NGOs – a term that would have sounded absurd only a few years ago – and such groups now deal with a range of sensitive issues from the environment to Aids.

There is far more argument and debate in China today, much of it challenging to Party orthodoxy, than the headlines of Western news stories reporting the latest ‘crackdown on dissent’ would suggest. The climate varies according to the political situation (don’t mention anything controversial – certainly not Sars – during the run-up to the annual National People’s Congress) and the choice of medium: the internet is freer than print journalism because the ‘old fellows’ at the top don’t know how to access the web. A number of subjects – anything about Tiananmen Square or the more recent suppression of the Falun Gong – remain out of bounds and those who transgress are punished harshly by the unreformed power of the ‘organs of state’.

Yet the issues which lie behind these forbidden topics – democracy versus political stability, freedom of expression against Party conformity – form part of an active debate in which thousands of intellectuals are asking the question that has preoccupied Nationalists and Communists alike for the past century: where is China heading? Very little of this debate has reached the outside world, which is much less interested than it used to be in China’s development. In the 1980s, as the country emerged from Maoism, we still asked questions about the future of Chinese socialism. Then, after the trauma of 1989, Deng Xiaoping got China moving again by declaring that isms no longer mattered, only economic reform. As China embraced the global economy and adopted the values of an emerging pan-Asian consumerist society, we stopped asking where it was heading, because the answer seemed obvious.

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

John Gittings, in his account of One China, Many Paths (LRB, 8 July), errs on three basic points. He Qinglian is not ‘the only contributor to the volume who has been forced to leave China because of her views’. Its editor, Wang Chaohua, was one of the 21 most wanted students by the government after the Tiananmen massacre, and is an exile. So too is Wang Dan, twice imprisoned for his role in the same events, and her interlocutor in a round-table on the upheaval of 1989 that ends the book. Nor is it the case, as he suggests, that – either in China or in the book – ‘the intellectual debate has not so far been an exploration of Many Paths,’ but simply an echo of ‘Deng’s de facto capitalism’. Deng’s capitalism is clearly rejected by nearly all the contributors to the book, among whom can also be found sympathetic views both of the Chinese Revolution and of socialism, as well as sharp critics of these. Finally, it is wrong to say that the question ‘what will happen to the Communist Party?’ remains unasked in the book.

Feng Xiaomai is quite right (Letters, 22 July); my apologies to Wang Chaohua and Wang Dan, forced into jail and/or exile after 1989, whose dissident roles are well known and admired. I meant to say that He Qinglian is the only intellectual in more recent years to have been forced out of China for her views. However, Feng misunderstands my point about the debate in One China, Many Paths to which all three contribute. I do not regard this debate as an ‘echo’ of Deng’s capitalism, but it has to operate within the context of a policy that has prevailed. Hardly anyone now expects the Communist Party to collapse – as many did after Tiananmen – or the dominant economic system to be radically changed. The argument is over evolution and reform. This does not diminish the importance of a book which, as I wrote, illustrates ‘the growing diversity of Chinese intellectual thought’.